Can Academia and the Media Handle the Truth?
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Can Academia and the Media Handle the Truth? Robert Maranto & Martha Bradley-Dorsey
Accepted: 25 August 2020 # The National Association of Scholars 2020
If Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency represents anything, it represents a rejection of elite gatekeeper institutions such as academia and the mainstream media, whose roles include distinguishing fact from opinion, discerning the difference between, say, climate change denial and climate change skepticism. Such gatekeeping is vital to liberal democracy in a vast republic, where citizens can’t possibly absorb all the information required to participate effectively in public affairs. But do those elite institutions deserve populist contempt? Sometimes. Those of us in academia and elite media are humans. Our personal values, friendships, and desire for continued employment may determine which research questions we ask, and in turn which facts we emphasize, and which we omit. Particularly on social media, whether one posts police beating protestors or rioters torching buildings—in a nation of 330 million it is easy to find either—inevitably reflects the values one brings to the table. Black Lives Matter offers a case in point. Few policy quandaries would seem to demand a disinterested examination of empirical data more than emotionally charged police shootings of civilians, especially of African American civilians. Yet those who would be in a position to produce such data and to utilize it have failed to do so. As then FBI Director James Comey lamented in 2015 regarding the Ferguson, Missouri unrest, his Bureau “didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a
Robert Maranto served in the U.S. government during President Bill Clinton’s administration and on his local school board, and is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas; [email protected]. Martha Bradley-Dorsey is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arkansas and a Bastiat Fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University; [email protected].
Maranto, Bradley-Dorsey
year, or one a century.” For a variety of reasons, our gatekeepers failed to address an issue we rely on them to resolve, keeping vital information from a public that requires it to make useful decisions. As Berkeley professor Franklin Zimring chronicled in When Police Kill (2017), only in the 2000s did the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics develop a small, under-resourced program counting police killings of civilians. Neither police chiefs nor police unions much wanted this data to see the light of day, for fear of how it might be used. After all, they are government bureaucrats whose jobs could, depending on the output, be made more difficult by the release of such data. Academia should have jumped in where bureaucrats had failed, but the field of police-involved killing of civilians hasn’t thrived because scholars are reluctant to explore such politically explosive subjects. Many social scientists have fled the field for fear of being labelled “r
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